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Essay Prize News Past Events Postgraduate

BAMS Essay Prize 2021 winners: Imola Nagy-Seres and Doug Battersby

Two essays have jointly been awarded this year’s BAMS Essay Prize of £250 and the publication of the essay in Modernist Cultures. We would like to congratulate both:

Imola Nagy-Seres, ‘Katherine Mansfield’s Poetics of Breathing’

The committee found this a fabulous rereading of Katherine Mansfield’s work though breath and physical culture.

Doug Battersby, ‘Ford Madox Ford and the New Cardiology’

The committee found this a wonderfully convincing article on cardiology, the heart, and Ford Madox Ford.

The standard of essays submitted this year was truly astounding and the prize committee would like to thank everyone who took the time to share their work. The field of modernism is in excellent hands if this is the standard of scholarship from our new and emerging colleagues.

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Call for submissions CFPs News

Call for nominations in D.H. Lawrence Studies (deadline 6 Sep 2021)

The D.H. Lawrence Society of North America is pleased to invite nominations for the following awards in Lawrence studies:

The Harry T. Moore Award for Lifetime Achievement in and Encouragement of Lawrence Studies.

The Mark Spilka Lectureship.  Lecture by a distinguished Lawrence scholar to be delivered at the International Conference. Awarded no less than once per decade.

The Extraordinary Service Award.  For service to the DHLSNA and/or Lawrence studies in general.

The Biennial Award for a book by a Newly Published Scholar in Lawrence Studies.  For a book substantially, though not necessarily exclusively, devoted to Lawrence.  Only books published from August 2018 to July 2021 will be considered. 

The Biennial Award for an article by a Newly Published Scholar in Lawrence Studies.  Only articles or book chapters published from August 2018 to July 2021 will be considered.  Chapters published in multi-author collections such as D.H. Lawrence in Context or the Edinburgh Companion to D.H. Lawrence and the Arts are eligible for this award, as are individual chapters in single-author volumes.

All nominations and self-nominations should be sent to DHLSNA President Elect Ronald Granofsky at granofsk@mcmaster.ca and must be received no later than Labor Day, 6th September 2021.  Winners will be announced in the Spring 2022 Newsletter.

Adam Parkes (President, DHLSNA)

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Featured News

BAMS statement on Black Lives Matter

We at BAMS recognise that more needs to be done to counter the whiteness of academia and of modernism studies, and that we need to do more.

In February 2020, The Higher Education Statistics Agency reported that fewer than 1% of professors employed at UK universities are black, whilst 85% are white. A recent report by Universities UK and the National Union of Students found that Black, Asian and Minority Ethnic (BAME)* students are more likely to drop out of university and are significantly less likely to graduate with a 2.1 or first class degree than white students. The attainment gap is particularly stark for black students. 

We recognise that the existing structure and environment of academia makes it an unsustainable place for many people of colour. Fine words and expressions of solidarity are not enough. We will be engaging in the following actions to counter the institutional racism that is embedded within British academia and we urge our colleagues – particularly white colleagues – to engage in them as well.

Within BAMS we will:

  • Be unflinching in our assessment of white modernism’s chequered history of racism, colonial exploitation and cultural appropriation, alongside the complicity of both modernist authors and texts in structures of oppression.
  • Actively promote the inclusion of academics of colour: mentor and support PGRs, ECRs and colleagues in practical and concrete ways: invitations to publish, invitations to speak, invitations to collaborate.
  • Work to ensure equal opportunities in appointments and promotions within our institutions.
  • Call out racism in all its forms, including unconscious bias and micro-aggressions.
  • Keep a keen eye on white privilege and watch out for white fragility. Be alert to the insidious workings of unconscious bias.
  • Recognise that the practical, intellectual and emotional labour of much diversity work currently falls disproportionately to colleagues of colour, and that this needs to change.

Within Higher Education more widely we ask colleagues to: 

  • Decolonise the curriculum. Ensure that writers, critics and theorists of colour are fully embedded and integrated in our modules and programmes, and not just in a tokenistic way. Realise that this work needs to start with curriculums within schools as well as in higher education. 
  • Scrutinise BAME student admissions, progression and attainment. Challenge the BAME attainment gap. Actively mentor and support undergraduate students of colour.
  • Acknowledge the politics of citations. Quote and promote scholarly work by people of colour.

We realise that there is much room for improvement within BAMS as an association, and we are currently working on a programme of actions to address the above points. We welcome dialogue and discussion with colleagues. Our new Equality, Diversity and Inclusion representative is Juliette Taylor-Batty, who can be contacted at j.taylor-batty@leedstrinity.ac.uk.

 

* We understand that there are substantial differences between black and BAME experiences, but speak to the language used in the administration of UK Higher Education, which we recognise as lacking in nuance.

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BAMS Conference News Past Events

Troublesome Modernisms: likely change of venue

BAMS 2019 Conference, Troublesome Modernisms, 20–22 June

There is currently a boycott of Senate House in support of the campaign to make outsourced workers (including cleaners, receptionists, security officers, catering staff, porters, audiovisual workers, gardeners and maintenance workers) direct employees of the University of London: https://iwgb.org.uk/en/boycottsenatehouse

The BAMS 2019 organisers support this boycott, as do many of our members and affiliate organisations. For this reason, we are currently looking to confirm an alternative venue in Central London. We regret the uncertainty that this situation introduces into planning for your trip and will keep delegates and potential delegates updated on the conference location in the coming weeks.

Further details about the conference and the fees, which are discounted for BAMS members, can be found here.

Registration is now open.

Please email troublesomemodernisms@bams.ac.uk if you have any questions.

 

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Essay Prize News Past Events Uncategorized

BAMS essay competition 2018: winner announced

We’re delighted to announce that the winning essay in the BAMS Essay Competition 2018 is “Humphrey Jennings’s ‘Film Fables’: Democracy and Image in The Silent Village” by Masashi Hoshino. Masashi has recently been awarded his PhD by the University of Manchester. The essay will be published in a forthcoming issue of Modernist Cultures and Masashi will receive £250 of book vouchers. The runner-up essay is “Anglo-French Poetic Exchanges in the Little Magazines, 1908–1914” by Sze Wah Sarah Lee. Sarah successfully completed her doctorate at Goldsmiths in 2016. Congratulations to both!

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News Postgraduate

Modernist Network Cymru: elections 2018

CALL FOR NOMINATIONS

For: The 2018 Election of the Modernist Network Cymru (MONC) Executive Steering Committee + up to two Postgraduate Representatives.

On 31 December 2017 the three-year term of the MONC Executive Steering Committee came to an end. We now invite nominations for membership of the Steering Committee and up to two postgraduate representatives. The closing date for nominations is 8 March 2018; the online election will take place between 12 – 23 March 2018.

For more information, see the MONC website.

 

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News

Time to renew your BAMS membership!

Thank you to those of you who have responded to EUP’s reminder and have already renewed your membership of BAMS for the calendar year 2017.

We would like to encourage those of you who have not yet renewed to do so via the subscription page at EUP.

RENEW NOW

You will see that the BAMS memberships are listed under the first tab Individual / Society Member. All BAMS memberships are available in the ‘online only’ and ‘print only’ tabs on the page and are identified by the phrases BAMS Membership or BAMS Membership (Student).

Subscription to the ‘print only’ BAMS membership option (both regular and student) includes hard copies of Modernist Cultures and online access to the journal by virtue of an access token sent, via email, once payment has been completed and we have received notice from EUP.

Please note that while EUP provides a discounted journal subscription price for MSA members, this does not include the membership fee for MSA.

You can also elect to pay by direct debit mandate so that your membership is automatically renewed at the end of the year. (See the payment options tab on the same page.)

Standard membership with hard copies of Modernist Cultures is £45 (£32 student), and standard membership with online only access to the journal is £28 (£23 student).

The benefits of joining BAMS include:

  • Print subscription to Modernist Cultureswhich is published three times a year
  • Online access to Modernist Cultures
  • Free or reduced access to allBAMS events including Modernist Life (BAMS international conference, June  29-July 1, 2017), postgraduate training days, and the ‘New Work in Modernist Studies’ graduate symposia
  • Access to members-only content on theBAMS website, including training resources and publisher discounts
  • Eligibility for entry to theBAMS essay prize for early career researchers
  • Eligibility to stand for election to the Executive Committee and to vote in the upcomingBAMS elections (information to be publicised soon).

Thank you very much for your support of BAMS over the last year and we hope to see you at a BAMS event in 2017.

Best wishes,

The BAMS membership team

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CFPs News Uncategorized

CfP: Periodicals In-Between – Periodicals in the Ecology of Print and Visual Cultures, Paris 27–29 June 2018

7th International Conference of the European Society for Periodical Research

http://www.espr-it.eu

27–29 June 2018 in Paris

The 7th annual conference of the European Society for Periodical Research will explore how periodicals from the eighteenth to the twenty-first century function as mediators of alternative or experimental forms of publication and as springboards for other publishing and cultural activities. Many periodicals gave birth to publishing houses by using their printers’ networks and by treating their issues as experimental or more conventional test cases and economic drivers both in the book and the print industry and in the arts and crafts. Often, the periodical is a vehicle for science enthusiasts, trade or professional organizations, literature and arts connoisseurs: volumes of aggregated materials published over the year, then bound in hard covers to resist time, respond to the needs of such readers. Or the opposite may be the case: publishers or galleries issue a periodical or magazine to underpin their publication list, to foster their artists, to test new formulas or to retain their audience. The phenomenon extends to prints, both as bonuses to subscribers and as original works. The study of such a phenomenon in its international scope would highlight the relations of periodicals with the world of publishing, art galleries, various salons and circles of influence, as well as with several alternate forms of publication, of new ideas, trends, and manifestos.

How is the standard history of book and print publishing extended by more nuanced considerations of media structures – economic and symbolic – that focus on the role of periodicals? What questions emerge when we consider periodicals as key drivers of print and visual cultures, the materiality of publications, their exchange value, and their function as cultural operators? We invite papers, panels, round table proposals that address these issues.

Topics could include but are not limited to:

— Periodicals and publishing houses

— Periodicals and galleries or salons

— Periodicals and print networks

— Periodical economies

— Periodicals and intertextuality; hybridization; remediation

— Parts; instalments; supplements; annuals

— Periodicals and prints for subscribers

— Periodicals and print-outs

— Periodicals and albums

— Periodicals as bound volumes/”books”

— Quotidian periodical cultures

— Alternative periodical cultures

Please send proposals in either English or French for 20-minute papers (max. 250 words), panels of three or four papers, round tables, one-hour workshops or other suitable sessions, together with a short CV (max. one page), to 2018ESPRit@gmail.com. The deadline for proposals is 31st January 2018.

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Lecture News Postgraduate Registration open

Lecture: From Avant-Garde to Architecture (and Back), London, 21 November

 Professor Tyrus Miller (University of California-Santa Cruz) will give a lecture entitled From Avant-Garde to Architecture (and Back) at the Institute of English Studies, London, at 18:00 on November 21.

About the paper:

 This paper considers the complex interactions of the historic avant-gardes with the symbolic idea, theory, and practice of modern architecture. Considering a number of cases including Malevich, Mondrian, Van Doesburg, Lajos Kassák, Moholy-Nagy, and El Lissitzky, I will discuss and assess Reyner Banham’s classic hypothesis that the avant-gardes played a crucial role for modern architecture in providing an “aesthetic discipline,” from outside of the architectural discipline, to make sense of various technical innovations, new materials, and emergent idioms of design. At the same time, for several avant-gardists architecture was invested with the dream of reinventing a totality lost among the multiplicity of incommensurable metropolitan sign-systems and forms: as a kind of utopian meta-art in which the autonomous languages of the various art-media, and even various extra-artistic dialects and functional idiolects, might be subsumed into a new, architectonic metalanguage assuring inter-translatability and social efficacy.

Tyrus Miller is Professor of Literature at the University of California at Santa Cruz. He is author of Late Modernism: Politics, Fiction, and the Arts Between the World Wars (U of California P, 1999); Singular Examples: Artistic Politics and the Neo-Avant-Garde (Northwestern UP, 2009); Time Images: Alternative Temporalities in 20th-Century Theory, History, and Art (Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2009); and Modernism and the Frankfurt School (Edinburgh UP, 2014). He is the editor of Given World and Time: Temporalities in Context (Central European UP, 2008) and the Cambridge Companion to Wyndham Lewis(Cambridge UP, 2016). He is the translator/editor of György Lukács, The Culture of People’s Democracy: Hungarian Essays on Literature, Art, and Democratic Transition (Brill, 2012) and series co-editor of Brill’s Lukács Library series.

Event details:

Senate House, Malet St, London, Room 246, 18:00 – 20:00

The event is free, but registration is required to ensure there’s room!

Please register your participation by contacting  the Seminar convenor, Dr Angeliki Spiropoulou, Visiting Research  Fellow at IES/SAS and Assist. Professor at Peloponnese University at  angeliki.spiropoulou@sas.ac.uk

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CFPs News

CFP: Britain, Canada, and the Arts: Cultural Exchange as Post-war Renewal, London, 15-17 June 2017

The call for papers is extended for a conference on Britain, Canada, and the Arts: Cultural Exchange as Post-war Renewal to be held at the Institute of English Studies, London, from the 15-17 June, 2017.

Proposals are invited until December 1.

About the conference

Papers are invited for a major international, interdisciplinary conference to be held at Senate House, London, in collaboration with the School of English, Communication and Philosophy (Cardiff University) and the University of Westminster. Coinciding with and celebrating the 150th anniversary of Canadian Confederation, this conference will focus on the strong culture of artistic exchange, influence, and dialogue between Canada and Britain, with a particular but not exclusive emphasis on the decades after World War II.

The immediate post-war decades saw both countries look to the arts and cultural institutions as a means to address and redress contemporary post-war realities. Central to the concerns of the moment was the increasing emergence of the United States as a dominant cultural as well as political power. In 1951, the Massey Commission gave formal voice in Canada to a growing instinct, amongst both artists and politicians, simultaneously to recognize a national tradition of cultural excellence and to encourage its development and perpetuation through national institutions. This moment complemented a similar post-war engagement with social and cultural renewal in Britain that was in many respects formalized through the establishment of the Arts Council of Great Britain. It was further developed in the founding of such cultural institutions as the Royal Opera, Sadler’s Wells Ballet, the Design Council and later the National Theatre, and in the diversity and expansion of television and film.

While these various initiatives were often instigated by a strong national if not nationalist instinct, they were also informed by an established dynamic of social, political, and cultural dialogue. In the years before the war, that dynamic had been marked primarily by the prominent, indisputably anglophile voices of such influential Canadians in Britain as Beverly Baxter and Lord Beaverbrook. In English-speaking Canada, an established recognition of Britain as a dominant, if not originating, influence on definitions of cultural excellence continued to predominate. In the years following the war, however, that dynamic was to change, and an increased movement of artists, intellectuals, and artistic policy-makers between the two countries saw the reciprocal development of an emphatically modern, confident, and progressive definition of contemporary cultural activity.

This conference aims to expose and explore the breadth of this exchange of social and cultural ideals, artistic talent, intellectual traditions, and aesthetic formulations. We invite papers from a variety of critical and disciplinary perspectives — and particularly encourage contributions from scholars and practitioners working in theatre, history, literature, politics, music, film and television, cultural studies, design, and visual art.

Some indicative post-war cultural figures and areas of influence:

  • Henry Moore and the Art Gallery of Ontario
  • John Grierson at the National Film Board
  • Leonard Brockington and the CBC
  • Sydney Newman, Alvin Rakoff and British and Canadian television drama
  • Tyrone Guthrie, Barry Morse, Tanya Moiseiwitch, Alec Guinness, Maggie Smith, John Neville, Christopher Newton, Robin Phillips, Barry Morse, Brian Bedford, Christopher Plummer, Donald Sutherland, and others: developments in staging, acting, repertoire, and theatre-design at the Stratford Festival, the Shaw Festival, the Old Vic, the Chichester Festival Theatre, the National Theatre
  • Powys Thomas at the CBC, the Stratford Festival, and the National Theatre School of Canada
  • Celia Franca, Gweneth Lloyd, and national ballet
  • Robertson Davies as novelist, actor, cultural critic in Britain and Canada; at the Stratford Festival; at the University of Toronto’s Massey College
  • Yousuf Karsh and the iconography of the mid-twentieth century
  • Intellectual exchange and influence: Northrop Frye, Harold Innis, Marshall McLuhan, John Kenneth Galbraith
  • Elizabeth Smart and the London literary scene
  • Ronald Bryden and theatre criticism in London
  • Benjamin Britten and Michael Tippett: Canadian tours and compositions
  • Glenn Gould as musical interpreter, recording artist, celebrity personality, documentarian
  • Mordecai Richler, the cultural scene in London, and the dramatization of Anglophone Quebec
  • Mazo de la Roche and Lucy Maud Montgomery: literary influence and adaptations
  • Ben Wicks as cartoonist, journalist, and post-war memoirist

Other areas of exploration include (but are certainly not limited to):

  • Quebec and ‘French Canada’ in the British artistic scene
  • The cultural presence and influence of the Governor General
  • Publishers and publishing networks
  • Newspapers, media magnates, and editorialists from Beaverbrook to Black
  • Universities and the ‘modernisation’ of higher education
  • Popular culture and popular music
  • Cultural policy-making
  • Traditions of humour and satire
  • ‘Distinct cultures’ within the larger nation
  • Constructions of indigeneity and native culture
  • National culture as anti-Americanism
  • Definitions of diversity, audience, and national identity
  • Architecture and urban development
  • More recent and contemporary exchanges in literature, art, politics, theatre, film, design, television, and the media

How to submit

Proposals (max. 250 words) for papers of 20 minutes can be sent to the organizers, Irene Morra (Cardiff University) and John Wyver (University of Westminster), at canbritconference@gmail.com by 1 December 2016.

More information is available via the conference website.